Those of you Linux users out there might enjoy the new Neo1973, a smartphone from FIC. This quad-band GSM/GPRS phone is the first to use open-source OpenMoKo platform, and, as you can see, it has a very unique look to it.

The 2.8 inch display LCD is an ultra-high resolution touchscreen. It has 128 MB of RAM, and 64 MB of Flash, along with a 64 MB MicroSD card. It is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application processor, which is powered by an ARM9 core. The phone also features an A-GPS system that can create wonderful maps in high resolution.

The Neo1973 smartphone can be charged via USB connection to a computer. It can also serve as a router for connecting a PC to the internet with its GPRS data connection ability.

The OpenMoko software will include a dialer, unified SyncML-enabled email/text messaging client, phonebook, and media player. More applications will be available via “feeds”, including those certified from FIC and other sources. The phone will also included a software manager with an “apt-get-like” function that makes it trivial to add, remove, and update applications that are packaged in the OpenEmbedded package format, including thousands of existing open source applications from the OpenZaurus, as well as Familiar Linus, and Angstrom products. For those who still prefer the popular Microsoft operating system, you can also have Windows Mobile on the Neo1973. In fact, the Neo1973, or FIC-GTA001, is one in a series of phones. A follow-up model is expected to offer both WiFi and Bluetooth.

A pilot run of 500 FIC Neo1973s should arrive in Mid-December. It will then reach general availability in January, selling directly from FIC for about $350 USD. Believe it or not, this phone was co-designed by the Chinese government as a Windows-based PHP (Personal Handy Phone) product. FIC apparently has the capacity to ship 100,000 of these phones per month.